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New Canadian opera recalls wartime tragedy at sea

That’s been the case for Toronto composer Stephanie Martin. In 2015, years after working as the music director at Calvin Presbyterian Church on Delisle Ave., she noticed a First World War plaque in honour of a nurse who had been killed just a few months before the end of hostilities.

The hospital ship Llandovery Castle was clearly marked, but that didn't save it from attack in the summer of 1918. (Paul Wilson)

She read up on the story of this nurse, who had devoted herself to caring for wounded soldiers and thought, wouldn’t this make a great opera?

“Then I was at a Canada 150 concert last summer and playwright Paul Ciufo introduced himself to me and complimented me on my music,” Martin recalls beside the gleaming black grand piano that dominates her living room.

She had a flash of inspiration. “I asked him if he had ever thought of writing a libretto for an opera. He said it had never occurred to him before.”

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Martin, who had never composed an opera before either, knew she needed a seasoned playwright. “Dialogue is the best way to build a character,” she says. She told Ciufo about the wartime tragedy and Ciufo, who had experience with historical drama, agreed to give it a try.

Less than a year later — record time in the slow-moving world of opera creation — The Llandovery Castle is ready for its first audience at Calvin Presbyterian Church.

On June 27, 100 years ago, less than five months before the end of the First World War, a German submarine torpedoed a Canadian hospital ship bound for Liverpool off the southern coast of Ireland.

The submarine’s captain thought the Llandovery Castle, clearly showing its Red Cross markings, was transporting troops and materiel. As the ship sank, he saw from the lifeboats that there really had been nurses and wounded soldiers on-board. He decided to turn his U-boat’s machine guns on these survivors so there wouldn’t be any witnesses to his mistake.

Fortunately, there were just enough survivors to tell the tale.

The tragedy of the sinking of the Llandovery Castle became the subject of the world’s first war-crimes trials in Germany, in 1921. More immediately, the brutal loss of innocent lives helped spur the Canadian war effort in the crucial remaining weeks that ended the war.

The Llandovery Castle has its world premiere on Tuesday and Wednesday, June 26 and 27, at Calvin Presbyterian Church. The producers are Toronto’s Bicycle Opera Project, who have parked their two-wheeled overland vehicles this summer to focus on this nautical project.

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Martin’s main persuasive tool is her music. Normally, a composer gets to work once the text is ready. “But in this case, I sent Paul a lot of music and I had a libretto by Christmas.”

Much of Ciufo’s dialogue was directly inspired by transcripts of the war-crimes trial, Martin says.

She completed most of the 90-minute score in January. “I was in such a happy place,” she recalls. “I just had to get up and write music all day.”

The result is, quite simply, gorgeous. The music is tonal, evocative and, best of all, singable. Bicycle Opera includes some of the city’s finest young singers, along with the help of seasoned opera director Tom Diamond. The combination should ensure a compelling premiere.

And not all of it is tragic. Martin describes how they added a comic-relief scene that tells the real-life story of a dog who was left dockside by a soldier going off to fight from Algeria.

“The dog jumped off the dock and swam after the ship,” Martin says. “The crew rescued the dog, who accompanied his owner to the front. When the solider was badly injured in battle, he got covered by the churned mud in the trenches and was thought lost. His dog was able find him in time to be rescued.”

All that from a random glance at a historical plaque in a church.

For more information and tickets, go to The Llandovery Castle’s website.

Classical music writer John Terauds is supported by the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism, San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation.

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